Crimson Echoes playthrough with youtube annotations as MP4

[Schala Zeal]

I just finished downloading all 92 videos of CEMemorial and was also able to download the commentary annotations as XML files. I was able to convert the XML files to SRT files (subtitle tracks) and with VLC I was able to get the annotations in the video as captioning. However, it's inconveniently always placed at the bottom of the screen in scalable font size so it often overlaps the text in dialog boxes.

I was wondering if anyone else had tried this.

[alfadorredux]

Haven't actually tried it, but I'd probably use mencoder, which has a subtitle placement option[1], to burn the subs in, rather than trying to set something up with VLC.

[1]Somewhere among its jizillion other options. mplayer/mencoder is sort of like one of those brick-sized Swiss Army Knives—versatile, but unwieldy.

[Schala Zeal]

I wouldn't want to burn them in, because they overlap the dialog at times. However, I might upload the subtitle tracks for those interested.

[ZeaLitY]

Can you go ahead and upload them?

[trig]

Here are screencaps of the CEMemorial videos with annotations.

Parts 1-42   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHLxdNUSihA
Parts 43-77   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhCTLIbS_co
Parts 78+   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksiC8W9ajog


YouTube no longer shows annotations. Annotation data seems to have been destroyed by YouTube Jan 2019... I wish I searched for this only one month earlier.

(Some annotation archival projects were running up til last month, but it's unlikely that these videos' annotations were archived. Archived YouTube video IDs are here, if you want to download a CSV whose size is on the order of 10 GiB.)

[trig]

Found archive with annotations including highlight/hover! Archive API: https://archive.omar.yt/api/v1/annotations/[video_id]
I generated SRTs from the archived YouTube annotations.

The text lines don't have any line breaks. If your player can't display them well, I can try to automate good line breaks for all the text.

[ZeaLitY]

I only annotated like 10% of the playthrough, right?

I need to do the rest. Do annotations even show up on Youtube these days? Not sure if they disabled that feature or how you recovered them, but damn, I would need to finish my commentary as well.

[trig]

Yeah, YouTube doesn't have annotations anymore, but thanks to the valuable work of some dedicated people, thousands (edit: hundreds of millions) of annotations were saved before YouTube totally removed access.

I just started watching the playthrough myself... The commentary seems fairly complete, at least in the beginning, with comments from yourself, FW, Agent12, JP, C99, and others.

[trig]

Update on annotation availability:

The site invidio.us is now able to grab annotations that have been archived at a few places on the internet. The Crimson Echoes playthrough playlist is here.

On invidio.us, just under the video, click "Show annotations", and they will appear in the video just like they used to on YouTube. You can also enable "Show annotations by default" in the invidio.us settings page.

[Lavos, a one-eyed tick]

I know it's been a long time since it's creation, but I can't seem to find the commentary tracks anywhere. Is there a place I can grab them?

[trig]

To my knowledge, audio commentary was never created.

[Lavos, a one-eyed tick]

That's strange. In some threads on the YT videos there are references to developers, including ZeaLity, discussing things. I think it's just comments that got removed in that case... But I would have liked to read them.

[Vehek]

As the thread title mentions, they were (pop-up) text annotations -- which Youtube killed and deleted this year. Trig's revival of the thread this year went over some efforts to retrieve them.

[trig]

Ah, yes, that's right.
The "annotations"--which are text commentary--are available to download above. You can also watch the CE playthrough videos with these annotations on any Invidious instance which supports annotation archives--I believe invidio.us still has them.

[Lavos, a one-eyed tick]

I found the playlist in 2018, never got to see them. I'll find time to watch them again some time on a site which still has them soon, at least I hope I do.